I have never believed in the God believed in by the Church of England Evangelical Council, the HTB hierarchy and the Anglican Global South majority – never. After seventy years in which time our ideas about God have continued to evolve, the regressive, authoritarian, dogmatic, supposedly orthodox, traditional theology and teaching still dominates the conservative evangelical mindset of the Church of England Evangelical Council and the Global South majority of the Anglican Communion.
The development of the person of Jesus of Nazareth as a symbol that is used to dominate and manipulate, a development warned about thirty five years ago, wasn’t heeded. It has continued to expand until it dominates the Church of England’s life today. It is one of the reasons why abuse and discrimination are common within the Church. Historical and contemporary reports of abuse and the failings of the safeguarding regime are manifestations of this unhealthy conception and caricature of Jesus.
Unless spiritually and mentally and conceptually we are drawn towards and become immersed in an open-minded, open-souled, open-hearted, unconditionally loving presence, the dream of God will not come to be. People will reject Christianity and walk away from the Church. They will find healing and truth wherever men and women recklessly, generously pour ointment on feet, where tears and love flow and the broken hearted are healed.
In 1957, aged nearly 12, I knew with an arrogant conviction that if God disapproved of me loving another boy, then God was wrong and I was right. I knew I was right to trust my feelings and physical desire for intimacy and love. I trusted my intuition, my awareness of who I am. I have had to learn again to trust the arrogant wisdom of my youthful self. Today I am still learning to trust and listen to my contemporary self, my body and feelings, and the energy within.
I knew in 1962 at the age of 17 that I didn’t believe that things in the Bible that were accepted as literal truth by the Church were literally true. They were unbelievable. Sixty years later, I am far more disturbed by the disjunction between my faith and the belief system in today’s Church of England. A newly-published book by Chris Scott: The Jesus myth: a psychologist’s viewpoint is a succinct, clear, honest, practical book. Chris suggests that we need to make a paradigm shift from the twentieth and twenty-first century belief that truth consists in scientifically provable facts to mythical truth, stories that are about human experience that help us understand and interpret ourselves and our world.
This is the opening section of a chapter from the book I’ve nearly completed. Re-reading it this morning, I realised that my theology - my vision of God - is entirely absent from the Living in Love and Faith book. The theology of the book is exclusively Salvation Theology. My theology has evolved over the past sixty years but my roots are still in what I intuited at the age of fifteen, an intuition that was confirmed three years later when Honest to God was published. I offer this as a commentary on the failures of the LLF book and the present College of Bishops, whose theology, based on LLF, is conservatively naive.
The question I heard the Church asking long ago in my youth and that I internalised and that continues to haunt me because people are still posing the question, is: “Am I allowed to be who I am, feel what I feel and think what I think?” Am I allowed to be gay, am I allowed to love who I love, am I allowed to feel desire for whom I choose, am I allowed to think outside what still seems to be a narrow, dogmatic, Church-think box?
In 1966 David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham from 1984 to 1994, wrote a brief Guide to the Debate about God, exploring the historical perspective as well as appraising developments following the publication of Honest to God in 1963. Jenkins admits that there has always been a debate about God, not only about what He is like but about whether He exists at all. He wanted to explore whether theism really is on the way out and whether any hope of believing in God has to be abandoned as a result of the ‘new theology’. I have returned to David Jenkins’ Guide to the Debate about God this week because he identifies core issues of faith and the ‘experience’ of God with which I have been engaging for over five decades and which I believe are now essential for the Church of England to re-engage with if it is ever to recapture people’s imagination and open hearts and minds to the experience of unconditional love.
Twenty-eight years ago in God’s Truth: Essays to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Honest to God, published in 1988 and edited by Eric James, John Bowden wrote “There is need for vision not only inside the churches but outside them. Vision and a concern actually to make some differences where there is a crying need for change. Honesty is quite manifestly not enough; more people are going to have to do some fighting.” The same concerns haunt me today.
